Qur'anic Commentary & Analysis through the Lens of Modern Science [9

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"The Koran comes to the "MASTER MIND" of the earth. The Qur'an is a poem, a code of laws, a prayer book, and the world's best bible combined. THE MAN UNIQUE! THE BOOK UNIQUE! As in a looking glass we behold the MASTER SPIRITUALIST of the world intoxicated with the gift of God."

--- P. Nathaniel Johnson, in his book, "Muslims In America"

The mystery behind Human Ear

"It is He(Allah) who created you (and made you grow), and made for you the faculties of hearing[ear] and sight…" ---Q-46:26

Analysis: Whenever the Qur'an is talking about human organs, the faculty of hearing(ear) is mentioned first before the faculty of sight and others. It is a well-known fact that human learning is largely dependent on the faculty of hearing more than anything else. A child born blind may be seriously handicapped, but may learn things with little difficulty. On the other hand, a child born deaf has things with little difficulty. On the other hand, a child born deaf has a very hard time learning anything. The Qur'an thus emphasizes the importance of the faculty of hearing over any other faculty. Furthermore, it should also be pointed out that ears in fetus develop as early as the twenty second day of pregnancy. The Fetus can then hear the voices of the rumbling of mother's stomach, and the sound she makes while eating and drinking. Moreover, the fetus can also hear the external sounds of his mother's environment. Thus the faculty of hearing is developed and functioning in a newborn much before the other faculties of life. This could explain why the Qur'an mentions the faculty of hearing before any other faculty of life. Thus the sunnah(hadith or wisdom) of the prophet also acknowledges this fact when it teaches us that as soon as a child is born, we should proclaim adhan, a Muslim call to prayer in the ears of the new born.
On Friday, November 2009, the BBC reported a scientific discovery where German researchers say the unborn babies are influenced by the sound of the first language that penetrates the womb. It further revealed that, it was already known that fetuses could memorize sounds from the outside world in the last three months of pregnancy and were particularly sensitive to the contour of the melody in both music and human voices.
Long before man discovered wireless, the ear knew all that was to be known about the reception of sound to pick up sounds and equipped with fleshy folds which enable it to perceive the direction from which the sounds come. Inside the ear, fine hairs and a sticky wax prevent harmful insects, dust, etc. from getting in. Across the inner end of the funnel there is a tightly stretched membrane, the ear-drum, which vibrates like the skin of a table when sound waves strike it. The vibrations are passed on and amplified by three bones(called the hammer, the stirrup and the anvil) whose relative sizes are precisely adjusted to produce just the needed amplification. Indeed these bones never grow: They are of exactly the same size in the infant and in the adult.
The amplified vibrations are carried by the bones to another membrane just beyond which lies the wonderful organ of hearing, the inner ear. This is a small tube(the cochlea) coiled up like the shell of a snail, and filled with a liquid in which a harp of 6,000 strings ranging in length from 1/20th to 1/2 mm., hangs suspended. Each string vibrates to a particular frequency of sound so that the ear can hear all possible combination of 6,000 different sounds. The vibration of the strings are transmitted to 18,000 nerve cells whose fibers communicate with the brain.
The Heart and the Mystery behind Heartbeat
"God has not made for any man two hearts in his breast[chest]" ---Q-33:4
"…And we [God] had endowed them with [faculties of] heart…when they went on rejecting the signs of God; and they were(completely) encircled by that which they used to mock!" --- Q-2:74
Analysis: The Qur'an mentions the heart in several occasions due to a peculiar phenomenon attached to it. The heart is a small organ, about the size of a fist, [4 inches long and 2& half inches broad] weighing not much more than eight ounces, yet this small pump can work prodigiously. It keeps on pumping day and night for a whole life-time without the least pause. It sends about a gallon of blood circulating through the body once every 13 seconds. According to the May 2010 issue of Awake magazine, our heart beat is at the hub of your circulatory system. If you are an adult, your heart beats over 100,000 times a day. Even when you are at rest, your heart muscles work hard-twice as hard in fact as your leg muscles do when you sprint. And when necessary, your heart can double its pace within five seconds. In adults, cardiac output varies from 5 liters[10 pints] a minutes-5 liters being the approximate amount of blood in the body-to as much as 20 liters a minute during exercise.
Your heartbeat is controlled by what has rightly been called a stunningly design nervous system. This system ensures that the heart's upper chambers(atria) contract before its lower chambers (ventricles) by delaying the contraction of the latter by a fraction of a second. Talking about blood pump, our hearts pump 2113 gallons of blood a day[an equivalent of a train of 65 large oil wagons]. And 7,771,382 gallons per year, without which our blood will not function at all. As a general rule, an animal's heart rate carries inversely with its body size – that is, the bigger the animal, the slower the heart rate. For instance, an elephant's heart beats on an average, 25 times a minutes, while that of a canary virtually buzzes at about 1,000 beats a minute! In humans the rate slows from about 130 beats a minute at birth to 70 or so in adulthood.
Most mammals appear to have a life expectancy of roughly a billion heartbeats. Therefore, a mouse, with 550 heartbeats a minutes, may live close to 3 years; whereas blue whales, with roughly 20 heartbeats a minute, may live more than 50 years. Humans are an exception. Judged by our heart rate, our life span ought to be about 20 years. A healthy human heart, however, may beat billion times or more and thus live in excess of 70 or 80 years! Even so, none of us would like to limit our life span to a set number of heartbeats, because deep down, humans yearn to live forever. In fact thin desire is natural, for God put it in us.
Going by these intricate and complex engineering dynamics of our ears and hearts that Allah created and mentions them several times in the Qur'an, one would wonder why we still have "Doubting Thomases", questioning the authenticity and validity of the Qur'an.
Interestingly, the rationale behind Allah revealing the first Qur'anic verse as "Iqrah", "read", has to do with the fact that, it is through knowledge that mankind would be able to uncover and unravel the mysteries of His universal and natural phenomena as elucidated and showcased in the above analysis.
Hussseini Yushau BabalWaiz, is the Research & Outreach Coordinator at the Center for Media & Peace Initiatives Inc. New York, Author of three books, including "Not good without God" & Tutor in Arabic & Islamic Studies in New York, babalwaiz71@gmail.com
Further reading:
160 Mysteries & Miracles of the Qur'an, by Dr. Mazhar Kazi
Islam & Modern Challenges, by Maulana Wahiddudin Khan